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Yes, they did: see this sentence in the article: >But science majors (including those studying biology, chemistry and psychology) judged him more harshly than

by tedks 14y ago

Yes, they did: see this sentence in the article: >But science majors (including those studying biology, chemistry and psychology) judged him more harshly than non-science majors. If you think psychology is ascientific, then you're living in the psychology of about a century ago. Psychology has been incredibly rigorous since the 1920s, and by virtually any metric it's as hard a hard science as any other hard science.

jquery 14y ago
Just because a field sprinkles numbers around doesn't make it a hard science. By that definition, marketing research is a hard science. What is psychology's unifying theory? Biology has evolution, physics has the standard model. Psychology has, what? Please, do enlighten me.
- ajb 14y ago
  A unifying theory is not a requirement for something to be a science. Physics was a science before the standard model.
  - jquery 14y ago
    You're mixing terms. Nobody is saying psychology doesn't use scientific methods. They are arguing it is not a hard science. The hard science version of psychology is called neuroscience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations.
    - emini_guy 14y ago
      >Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations. Well, that's was astronomy was doing all the time before Newton. Does it mean it was not a hard science? Psychology is doing the best it can do. It may simply never be a hard science. It is not now to most people, myself included. I think it is not a hard science because the human nature is too complex to be investigated in a simple manner. Psychologists are aware of it and they refuse to use simplistic models. Neuroscience is much simpler. It studies the brain, not the human personality that can have many layers.
    - tedks 14y ago
      From that article: """ Philosophers and sociologists of science attempting to identify measurable correlates of perceived disciplinary 'hardness' have been unable to account for the distinction using these systematic, theoretical characteristics.[10] I """
  - emini_guy 14y ago
    Good point. In fact, the standard model of particle physics is hardly a complete unifying theory. Far from it. What's worse, the more all-encompassing theory of fundamental interactions, M-theory, seems to indicate that we may need to rely on several theories to describe the deeper reality, which is not unlike in psychology where we also don't have a unifying picture, but several pictures of human nature. I say so as a physicist. It's easy to bash psychology, but it's important to be realistic about what you can really expect from it. I don't consider psychology to be a particularly hard science at all, but I don't think it should be dismissed as a non-scientific field.
- tedks 14y ago
  The closest analogue is probably connectionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism But then, psychology has existed for about a hundred years; physics has existed since the Greeks. "Hard" science is a useless distinction, I think. I've never heard a useful experimental procedure that can distinguish between the two. Yours in particular is very overconstrained; I don't know of a "unifying theory" for astronomy, geology, oceanography, or computer science, all of which are in my university's "college of mathematical and natural sciences," which are all presumably "hard."
calibraxis 14y ago
Unlikely. The main problem is that calling a tradition "non-scientific" or "not hard science" also has a pejorative meaning. And there's an unfortunate mystification of science as something other than a mode of inquiry, with its limitations and advantages. Plus, people gain funding by hitching themselves to the social respectability of science. In the case of psychology, they're studying something of great interest which happens to be far too complex for easy scientific study. (Take for example the physicist; once the object or system under study becomes too complex, it's tossed to the chemist, who in turn tosses overly complex things down the line...) (I've heard similar analysis from some scientists. I vaguely recall Chomsky recently gave a lucid explanation in his talk "The machine, the ghost and the limits of understanding: Newton's contribution to the study of mind", as well in a couple books he wrote. For his part, he thinks linguistics is in a pre-galilean phase. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0)
lutusp 14y ago
> If you think psychology is ascientific, then you're living in the psychology of about a century ago. On the contrary, psychology is today widely recognized as scientific in name only: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-myth-of-self-correcting-science/266228/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-myth-o... But beyond the many psychology scandals presently being discussed, it's important to say that descriptions, regardless of how detailed they are, don't constitute science. For science, one must risk a testable explanation, a theory. The absence of theories, testable and tested, and on which different psychologists can agree, is what separates psychology from mainstream science. In the crafting of the new DSM-V (about to be published), psychologists added mental conditions, and removed conditions, based on -- evidence? -- no, on votes, and secret votes at that. This is not science. The unscientific state of psychology has led the present director of the NIMH to take note of the gradual eclipsing of psychology by neuroscience: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ... A quote: "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." > Psychology has been incredibly rigorous since the 1920s, and by virtually any metric it's as hard a hard science as any other hard science. Quite false. Few psychologists agree with each other on anything, and fewer still are willing to put forth a testable, falsifiable theory about the workings of the human mind. This is why spectacular frauds like Stapel and Hauser can play the field like a badly tuned violin -- few practitioners are qualified to recognize that it's not science.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tedks 14y ago
  You appear to be living in the psychology of about a century ago. I'd recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow as a good layperson's introduction to cognitive psychology in the fields of decision-making and estimation. I also suggest you see http://mres.gmu.edu/pmwiki/uploads/Main/Hedges1987.pdf http://mres.gmu.edu/pmwiki/uploads/Main/Hedges1987.pdf for a review of the degree of consistency within psychology and physics.

by tedks 14y ago

jquery 14y ago

Just because a field sprinkles numbers around doesn't make it a hard science. By that definition, marketing research is a hard science. What is psychology's unifying theory? Biology has evolution, physics has the standard model. Psychology has, what? Please, do enlighten me.

ajb 14y ago
A unifying theory is not a requirement for something to be a science. Physics was a science before the standard model.
- jquery 14y ago
  You're mixing terms. Nobody is saying psychology doesn't use scientific methods. They are arguing it is not a hard science. The hard science version of psychology is called neuroscience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations.
  - emini_guy 14y ago
    >Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations. Well, that's was astronomy was doing all the time before Newton. Does it mean it was not a hard science? Psychology is doing the best it can do. It may simply never be a hard science. It is not now to most people, myself included. I think it is not a hard science because the human nature is too complex to be investigated in a simple manner. Psychologists are aware of it and they refuse to use simplistic models. Neuroscience is much simpler. It studies the brain, not the human personality that can have many layers.
  - tedks 14y ago
    From that article: """ Philosophers and sociologists of science attempting to identify measurable correlates of perceived disciplinary 'hardness' have been unable to account for the distinction using these systematic, theoretical characteristics.[10] I """
- emini_guy 14y ago
  Good point. In fact, the standard model of particle physics is hardly a complete unifying theory. Far from it. What's worse, the more all-encompassing theory of fundamental interactions, M-theory, seems to indicate that we may need to rely on several theories to describe the deeper reality, which is not unlike in psychology where we also don't have a unifying picture, but several pictures of human nature. I say so as a physicist. It's easy to bash psychology, but it's important to be realistic about what you can really expect from it. I don't consider psychology to be a particularly hard science at all, but I don't think it should be dismissed as a non-scientific field.
tedks 14y ago
The closest analogue is probably connectionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism But then, psychology has existed for about a hundred years; physics has existed since the Greeks. "Hard" science is a useless distinction, I think. I've never heard a useful experimental procedure that can distinguish between the two. Yours in particular is very overconstrained; I don't know of a "unifying theory" for astronomy, geology, oceanography, or computer science, all of which are in my university's "college of mathematical and natural sciences," which are all presumably "hard."

calibraxis 14y ago

Unlikely. The main problem is that calling a tradition "non-scientific" or "not hard science" also has a pejorative meaning. And there's an unfortunate mystification of science as something other than a mode of inquiry, with its limitations and advantages. Plus, people gain funding by hitching themselves to the social respectability of science. In the case of psychology, they're studying something of great interest which happens to be far too complex for easy scientific study. (Take for example the physicist; once the object or system under study becomes too complex, it's tossed to the chemist, who in turn tosses overly complex things down the line...) (I've heard similar analysis from some scientists. I vaguely recall Chomsky recently gave a lucid explanation in his talk "The machine, the ghost and the limits of understanding: Newton's contribution to the study of mind", as well in a couple books he wrote. For his part, he thinks linguistics is in a pre-galilean phase. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0)

lutusp 14y ago

> If you think psychology is ascientific, then you're living in the psychology of about a century ago. On the contrary, psychology is today widely recognized as scientific in name only: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-myth-of-self-correcting-science/266228/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-myth-o... But beyond the many psychology scandals presently being discussed, it's important to say that descriptions, regardless of how detailed they are, don't constitute science. For science, one must risk a testable explanation, a theory. The absence of theories, testable and tested, and on which different psychologists can agree, is what separates psychology from mainstream science. In the crafting of the new DSM-V (about to be published), psychologists added mental conditions, and removed conditions, based on -- evidence? -- no, on votes, and secret votes at that. This is not science. The unscientific state of psychology has led the present director of the NIMH to take note of the gradual eclipsing of psychology by neuroscience: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ... A quote: "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." > Psychology has been incredibly rigorous since the 1920s, and by virtually any metric it's as hard a hard science as any other hard science. Quite false. Few psychologists agree with each other on anything, and fewer still are willing to put forth a testable, falsifiable theory about the workings of the human mind. This is why spectacular frauds like Stapel and Hauser can play the field like a badly tuned violin -- few practitioners are qualified to recognize that it's not science.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tedks 14y ago
You appear to be living in the psychology of about a century ago. I'd recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow as a good layperson's introduction to cognitive psychology in the fields of decision-making and estimation. I also suggest you see http://mres.gmu.edu/pmwiki/uploads/Main/Hedges1987.pdf http://mres.gmu.edu/pmwiki/uploads/Main/Hedges1987.pdf for a review of the degree of consistency within psychology and physics.